BY ESER KARAKAS
STAR- Last month I wrote about an important initiative spearheaded by Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker. It basically aims to boost agricultural productivity, provide a supply-demand balance, reduce the burden on public financing, and enhance Turkey's competitiveness. I was away when Eker held a meeting on the initiative, but Professor Mehmet Altan filled me in on the details.
Turkey has an agricultural productivity problem. The European Union productivity average is nearly four times greater than ours. And we shouldn't forget that the US is nearly twice as productive as EU states. This productivity difference affects Turkey and will continue to do so in the future, as the World Trade Organization (WTO) increases liberalization in agricultural trade.
Our short-term basic agricultural aim is getting involved in the EU's joint agricultural policy, and thus today comparisons are mostly made to the EU's agricultural productivity. There are various explanations for this huge productivity difference, but most believe the key factor is the size difference of agricultural enterprises. The average size of Turkish agricultural enterprises is some six hectares, compared to an EU average of 18 hectares. This explains the productivity difference to a great extent.
Turkey should change its inheritance laws, prevent further division of the land, and even launch incentives to encourage mergers. This process will be very hard and cause huge population shifts, but it is inevitable. In line with this process, the Agriculture Ministry is implementing its agricultural basin production and support model in order to boost agricultural productivity. Maybe the most important thing was having Turkey's agriculture analyzed for the first time in many centuries.
Obviously, work and planning without good data are useless. The Agriculture Ministry divided Turkey into 30 regions, not in terms of administrative or political criteria, but in order to maximize agricultural productivity. If this work can be done without being blocked by political obstacles, great progress can be made to raise agricultural productivity. But we still face the combination of agricultural enterprises, which is a more important problem, and the need to produce one agricultural enterprise out of nearly three existing ones. Eker's skills on these issues will be needed overcome this problem, one of our pressing structural problems.